OpenMSX 0.6.2 released

[Robert]

MSX emulator

 

Release Name: 0.6.2

 

Notes:

Release Notes for openMSX 0.6.2 (2007-04-15)

============================================

 

This release contains several new features and many bug fixes and optimizations.

 

The main new feature is the addition of the video recorder. It enables you to record videos, including sound, of what you are doing with your emulated MSX. Thanks to the DosBox Team for their great ZMBV lossless video codec.

 

The most noticeable speed optimizations are in the rendering: the SDLGL-PP renderer can be up to 50% faster and the SDL renderer is about 6% faster. If you were having problems with speed, give this release a try.

 

The trainers that are shipped with openMSX are now a lot more user friendly. It is possible to enable or disable individual cheats of a trained game.

 

Bug fixes in the PSG and SCC, as well as a new way of sample rate conversion, result in the PSG and SCC sounding very much like the real MSX now.

 

New or improved emulator features:

- Video recording and improved sound recording (stutterless).

- SDLGL-PP renderer (OpenGL 2.0) can do hq and hqlite scaling in hardware.

- More usable trainers.

- Extended hot keys: you can now bind any host event to a TCL command, which means you can e.g. let openMSX push the MSX F1 key if you press a certain button on your PC game pad.

- Event recording and replaying (experimental for now: only available at command line, recorded session starts when openMSX starts).

- Debugger now supports watchpoint regions.

 

MSX device support:

- V9990 enhancements: deinterlace, cursor Y position in overscan mode, huge speed optimizations for P modes.

- SCC sound quality improvements (no more aliasing).

- Support for the Playball mapper (and samples).

- Fixed mirroring of some FDC registers and diskROMs.

- Dot matrix graphical printer emulation added (thanks to the blueMSX Team).

- Cassetteplayer recognizes end of tape and stops.

- Small bug fixes in various devices: MSX-Audio, V9990, VDP, SCC, PSG, TC8566AF.

- Various speed optimizations: VDP command engine, Z80, video rendering, V9990, debugger response time in break mode.

- Added a few Arabic MSX machines, but note that they have not been verified to be correct.

 

Build system, packaging, documentation:

- Added support for building an application folder on Mac OS X.

- Added support for building a universal binary for Mac OS X.

- HTML-ized the Console Command Reference and the diskmanipulator documentation.

There is now also linking to these new manuals, which improved the usefulness of them a lot.

- Added a text document about how developers can control openMSX from their own application: doc/openmsx-control-xml.txt.

 

And of course the usual various bug fixes.

 

In "doc/manual/index.html" you can find a set of HTML manuals for openMSX.

Make sure you read this if you haven't used openMSX before, but also to learn more about the new and changed features.

 

Known issues / caveats:

- Emulation is not perfect yet.

See the bug tracker on sourceforge.net for known bugs.

- Until we reach version 1.0.0, file formats can change in an incompatible way without backwards compatibility. This happened between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0, for example. Keep this in mind if you create machine descriptions, ROM database entries etc. We do try to be backwards compatible for at least one release, though. Keep in mind that openMSX is still evolving at a considerable speed.

- openMSX is confirmed to run on the following operating systems: Linux, Win32, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD; on x86, x86-64, Sparc and PPC CPU's. Running on other operating systems (wherever SDL runs) or CPU's should be possible, but may require some modifications to the build system. If you are compiling on a new platform, please share your experiences (see below for contact info), so we can make openMSX more portable.

- CPU and graphics performance varies a lot, depending on the openMSX settings and the MSX hardware and software you're emulating. Some things run fine on a 200 MHz machine, others are slow on a 2 GHz machine. For performance tuning tips, see the Setup Guide.

 

openMSX Home Page:

http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/

Project page on SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmsx/

Contact options:

- Send a message to the openmsx-user mailing list. Go to the SourceForge project page and look under "Lists".

- Post on our forum: http://forum.openmsx.org/

- Talk to us on #openmsx on irc.freenode.net.

 

Have fun with your emulated MSX!

 

- the openMSX developers

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